No Kings, Organizing, and Winning: an Interview With Our Revolution’s Larry Cohen

Michael Albert: Hello, my name is Michael Albert, and I’m the host of the podcast that’s titled Revolution Z. Our guest this time is Larry Cohen. Larry served as president of the 600,000-member Communications Workers of America from 2005 to 2015, and he has spent nearly all his adult life as a member, organizer, and officer. He is now board chair of Our Revolution, the successor organization of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. Larry has also been a member of the Democratic National Committee since 2005 and was vice chair of the Unity Reform Commission, which drafted proposals adopted by the full DNC to democratize the party and the presidential nominating process. He frequently writes on worker rights, politics, and democracy for various publications. So, Larry, welcome to Revolution Z.

Larry Cohen: Great to be with you.

Michael: I feel like there are a very wide array of things I would love to ask you about. But how about if we start with the No Kings demonstrations that occurred just a few days earlier than we’re recording this on October 23rd? So how do you think October 18th happened? To what extent did it mobilize and gather people who were already eager to resist Trump by issuing a call that indicated the time and place of events that the people then eagerly joined? And to what extent did it reach out to attract new people by addressing their prior doubts and or increasing their desire and hope? Put differently, participation is reported to have risen by two million from the earlier round. How did that happen?

Larry: I think in part it happened because of the autocracy, the oligarchy as we call it, gaining steam for the last six months since round one of No Kings. It also happened through organizing.  A broad array of organizations with a wide variety of strategies came together last Saturday and last June. To fight fascism, you need a broad front. At the same time, to actually win and change the country, which you know we’ve spent our lifetimes on, you need a strategy for change, not just for resistance.

Michael: And I wonder about three particular constituencies, actually, in light of what you just said: young people, minorities, and working people. I’m not sure of their participation level, but I have a feeling, mainly anecdotal, honestly, that young people in particular are a good deal less represented than their presence in the past would predict. How do you see it? If it is true, what might be done about it?

Larry: Well, I was out in Western Maryland with over a thousand people showing up in a Trump county. And, you know, a good percentage were young. You can’t go by that. That’s one of you know thousands of events that occurred Saturday. But you know, my sense is that in terms of working people and young people, I’m not as certain in terms of Black Americans, there is a huge pouring out. I mean, the Mamdani campaign in New York is very much fueled by young people, whether they’re black, brown, or white, whether they’re college-educated working people or not, immigrants as well. Pulling people together in America has always been a challenge. My 50-some years in the resistance movement, we get one group, we lose another group. Can we get everybody? How are we mobilizing? What are the strategies? What are we fighting for? You know, it’s a shit show in this country. So nothing’s changed in that regard. People like Bernie, AOC, Mamdani, are able to cut across a lot of that, but not all of it. It’s a tall order in a country with a history like this one.

Michael: Indeed. But looking forward, let’s stick with youth for a second. You probably remember, I remember, major demonstrations. What No Kings have done is larger. So that’s not the issue. But I remember campuses having feeder marches. So that, in other words, you had an outpouring from campus after campus that was organized. And the students were on the move and would go to the big demonstration, but then they would also do their own work back on the campus. And I get the feeling that that hasn’t happened yet. I have a feeling it’s about to, but I think it hasn’t happened yet. You’re probably more in touch with what’s going on across the country than I am, and I wonder whether you see that or not.

Larry: If you’re alluding to late 60s, early 70s, there’s no question that high school and college campuses were much more alive then. I grew up in North Philadelphia, and I was heavily involved organizing against Frank Rizzo, who was the police commissioner, a notorious racist, openly racist, who became the leader of the Democratic Party and elected twice as mayor as a Democrat, even though he was an avowed racist.  On May 8th, 1970, I was a key organizer in shutting down every high school and college campus in Philadelphia. There were five lines of march. We went to Independence Hall at 12 noon on a Friday and had over 100,000 people there. The attendance was reported, in the high schools, to be 10%. And those high schools were at least half black. So, in that in that moment, it was the racism of Rizzo coming together with anti-war activity and more, really. And yes, those movements were led much greater than now by high school and college-age people. And, you know, I joke around a lot because, as you mentioned, I ended up president of a huge labor union so I’ve spoken to giant rallies outside for 55 years now. And in many ways, that one, May 8, 1970, was the largest one that I organized. I was involved in the demonstration against Iraq speaking for CWA in 2001, with well over a million in New York City. But I think your point’s right that the kind of systemic organizing among high school and college-age students that we saw 50 years ago has not been replicated, and I’d have to think more about why.

Michael: It’s a tough question. I’ve thought it has something to do with the type of youth culture then, being relatively absent now, with social media, phones, and people feeling spied on. There’s a lot of variables for sure, but it is an area in which things could get still better in terms of the resistance. And in that light, I wonder, even given No King’s incredible virtues and achievements, which really are substantial, though a lot of longtime leftists don’t don’t quite acknowledge that, though it’s true. What, nonetheless, do you think might be done in future efforts, or what might future efforts need to accomplish to in fact do as they intend, stop fascism, and even beyond that to win ongoing positive gains going into the future? I know it’s a big question, but you’ve been around, so, if you were sitting in a room, and actually I don’t know, you may well be sitting in a room with people working on the next one, when should the next one be? And how often should they be? And what, if anything, should be changed going forward?

Larry: Great questions. I don’t want to jump into answers that I’m not certain about. But on the one hand, I think resistance to the oligarchy, to fascism, to autocracy, authoritarianism, lots of words for what we face here, is very, very broad and not that deep. What is it that we are fighting?

In our revolution and the Bernie world, we’re fighting the oligarchy, not just Trump. So we try to define it as the billionaires, the technocrats, Trump, the Republican Party and a big chunk of the Democratic Party. Where does the funding come from for many Democrats when they run for election? The Our Revolution shirt that I wore Saturday, said “defund the oligarchs, fund the people.”

That means where’s our health care, early childhood education, long-term care, those things are missing from the richest country in the world. Missing or way too expensive or out of reach for giant chunks of the population.

Defund the oligarchs, and cut off the extra $150 billion that Trump put into military spending. He now rightfully calls it the Department of War. That’s what it is. That’s what it’s been for my lifetime, the only thing I might agree with him on. But that funding, as you well know, over a trillion dollars this year just for the military budget, doesn’t even include Homeland Security and many other aspects of the militarization of this country, that could fund all the things that I mentioned. Even if you cut it in half, it could fund virtually all of those things. And if we had Medicare for all, you would cut the $4 trillion in healthcare spending, twice as much as any other country spends as a percentage of gross domestic product with worse results. So, lots of easy answers here. The question is, how do we organize for that vision? And as I used to say in CWA, not just defense, offense.

If you wanted to go to a sports analogy, there’s virtually no sport where you can play only defense and change anything. The way I put it on Saturday, we’re not just fighting against oligarchs, we’re fighting for the people we love. And it’s that spirit of the people we love when we talk about healthcare and education, and workers’ rights, which has been my lifetime.

We have the worst workers’ rights support in the world in terms of organizing and bargaining rights when people want to build a worker organization, a union, and bargain with their employer. We’re at the bottom of every democracy by every measurement in terms of workers’ rights. For me, that’s the people I love as much as my own children and grandchildren. So how we cobble together enough of that to keep not only the resistance movement going, but the movement for real change, is not well articulated.

The blocks to democracy, including workers’ rights, there’s seven or eight big ones are sadly unique to our nation.  In Argentina, fighting their own version of fascism right now, the majority of workers have bargaining rights, and they fight back, not only at the bargaining table, but politically with general strikes and with their own political organizations. And like most of the democratic world they have sectoral bargaining. Not bargaining at one workplace at a time, like in the U.S., instead, whole industrial sectors bargain, and the results extend to all workers in that sector.  I’m going too deep on that one subject.

Another example would be the role of the federal judiciary here is like a another monarchy. They’re a lifetime in office unless they resign or retire.  Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley calls it a judiciary that thinks it’s another Congress.

And then there’s our Senate, with 60 votes, initial cloture, needed to put a measure on the floor for discussion—part one of the filibuster.  We rightfully focus on electing a Democratic majority in the Senate, but we need to have a Democratic majority that’s gonna get rid of initial cloture, and then regulate debate so that majority rules.

That’s already three blocks to our democracy. Steps to amend the Constitution, worst of any democracy in the world, virtually impossible. Three-quarters of the state legislatures, two-thirds of the Congress to pass an amendment. As a result of these blocks to our democracy, it is harder to mobilize people in this country. I’m still thinking about high school and college students and why they’re not leading as they have at other times and in other countries.

Michael: I want to hone in for a minute on one of the things that you said. I think it’s gonna surprise you. It resonated with something that I don’t think I dreamt. I think I actually saw an ad for Bernie during the campaign back in 2016, in which he was talking to the public, as he does, and in which he said, if we can get to the point where we care about the person across town as we care about our neighbor, our family, then we win. And I was sort of blown away by somebody on TV saying that. And you just said essentially the same thing. That is, you said you care about the people in the workforce like you do your kids and your grandkids.

We constantly have our eyes on the demands or various tactical factors. But not on that factor. And yet that factor, who we care about, might be really, really important. And another one that might be really important is some sense of confidence, of efficacy, and some understanding of collectivity. So I have two questions. One, how has Trump convinced everybody that he’s so damn strong? Because, okay, he’s got the government, but he’s not that strong if people just understood the idea of collectively opposing him. I couldn’t understand why when Musk was firing everybody, they just didn’t say no. We’re not going. You know, we’re sitting down. Or when Trump says to the university, play the game this way, the students just didn’t shut it down and say no. He wouldn’t have been able to deal with that. Even the law firms. He couldn’t have dealt with those big law firms if everybody just said no.  I know it’s hard to get to that point. But isn’t the real issue not figuring out what’s wrong and not figuring out even what demands to make? That part’s easy. But figuring out how to sort of get that confidence and caring dynamic going?

Larry: Well, last Saturday was people saying no. That is what united the people, whether they were like me, at rural demonstrations or in a giant demonstration in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Washington, or Los Angeles, where there were more than 100,000 people. What unites them is the opposition to Trump, the orange monster.

Trump makes it harder because unlike most politicians, he doesn’t just talk, he acts. Obama sadly taught to care much less about messaging. I grew up with five adults and me. My great grandmother, Mary Francis, said, everybody can talk here—I’ll watch your feet, not your mouth. And I’ve repeated that, you know, for decades. People more commonly say actions speak louder than words. Our politics should be about strategies for action and not just messaging. Policies should not be simply raising money for messaging, and then winning an election, and then get ready for the next election.

Obama won in a landslide election year, and it wasn’t just his landslide, it was the House and the Senate—60 Democratic senators. Now sixty Democratic senators seems out of reach—there’s no path to 60. It was squandered in 2009 and then in his final few years Obama and his team, focused on adopting the Trans-Pacific Partnership that would again screw working class people.

For me, it’s always an organizing challenge. You know, organizing at every level. And Democrats have failed miserably for the last 35 years when we elected Clinton for eight, Obama for eight, often huge Democratic majorities in Congress and far too little was accomplished. Our test should be what the F have you gotten done? And why not more? And why do we have Trump now talking about cutting back pharmaceuticals and a bunch of Democrats agreeing with him? As an example why wasn’t that done by Democrats beyond the mall steps taken by Biden? And why did so-called Obamacare cave in not only to pharma, but to the insurance industry and to the hospital industry?

Michael: What’s your answer to that? That is to say, it’s not as if it was impossible, right? No, it was very possible. Yeah, it was it was quite possible, and irrespective of anything larger than that one that one might want, why do you think that—correct me if this is wrong—it’s a slippery slope. That is to say, if the Democrats of the sort that we’re talking about now do big things, it demonstrates to the public that things are possible. And the minute that you have some things, you rightly think about what’s next, what more? And so the impediment isn’t that they’re sadistic and you know they’re withholding something modest that could be done, it’s that they’re afraid. They’re putting a lid on accomplishing things that they could accomplish and even enhance their own popularity and even enhance their own electoral prospects, because they’re afraid of where it leads. Is that plausible to you at all?

Larry: Yes, especially In the Obama years when I was enough of a leader that I could see what they were all doing.  Since then, there’s been a sizable number of Democrats, led by the House progressive caucus, prepared to do more. For me, the strategy is to work inside and outside the party. That’s the broader strategy. You can’t just work inside.  If we look at workers’ rights or health care, we had an overwhelming majority in the House ready to do something real, much deeper on both. And in the Senate we had a majority, but we didn’t have a White House or a Senate leader or even 50 senators prepared to eliminate the filibuster and implement majority rule. A simple majority can use a parliamentary motion and change Senate procedure.

Whether it’s the rules for organizing unions, or getting rid of superdelegates, which we finally accomplished in 2017 in the Democratic Party, it’s the “Rules not just the Rulers.”

Another example now is getting the corporate and dark money out of the nominating process of the state Democratic parties. We just passed a resolution at the DNC to do that in 2028 for the presidential. We still have to implement it. Too many people get elected as Democrats in the House, in the Senate, as president because of big money. And the big money that funds those Democrats, often is Republican big money. Especially in House districts where there’s only going to be a Democrat elected, corporate management and billionaires know they must try to control the Democratic nominee. Zoran’s primary victory can teach us all. Cuomo came in with billionaire money and lost anyway, because it’s a tight enough city that with 50,000 volunteers you can overcome that kind of messaging that flooded the airways. But you can’t do it in most house districts.

Progressive caucus from Keith Ellison to Pramilla Jayapal, Keith and now Greg Casar can make a real difference but we also need to change the rules in the Senate and in the Democratic Party.

Obamacare is another example.  What did we end up with versus what we should have had? There were more than 50 Democrats in the Senate that would have passed the House bill. Is the House bill what I would have done? No, I supported Medicare for All—Bernie’s core issue. But with that House bill, we wouldn’t be in the shit we’re in now on healthcare, because it included a public option. The public option could have mimicked Medicare and given people that choice state by state. So again, that’s a lot of details, but out of those details comes what are the core problems that we face. Obviously core also includes the Citizens United 2010 Supreme Court ruling that money is speech and the billionaires can spend as much as they want to influence elections. Billionaires, like Larry Ellison and Elon Musk, they’ll spend hundreds of millions because they get billions back.

Michael: I wonder if there’s a difference between the way you’re describing how various sectors of Democrats  have faced the situation and how Trump faces the situation. You know, it’s ironic, but Trump says, let’s just change the procedures. Let’s just change the rules. We just have to build everything all over again. We just have to do it right. Now, what he means by do it right is disgusting. But set that aside for a minute, for some reason he does have a different mindset than even somebody like Obama or whoever else you want to talk about. I’m not even sure that Bernie has that much of a mindset. You know, that if Bernie had won the election, would he have sat in the Oval Office and said, okay, let’s just start from freaking scratch. What do we need to do to deliver? And I’m not sure why that is, but it is a fundamental difference. And right now it’s a serious problem, obviously. And so my question, and there’s a second part to that, which is that if Trump 10 years ago, well, 20 years ago, and the people around him, right, had looked at the world, they might have said something like what you said earlier. It’ll take 50 years before we can be in position to even do our policies, forget rebuilding everything. But it wasn’t 50 years, right? It wasn’t at all. And I’m wondering why you feel that on the humane side of the ledger it’s impossible to conceive of a project that simply doesn’t abide by the expectations, and is more like Trump on that one score. It says the rules are to be remade, the procedures are to be remade. If we have to run over stuff, so be it. You know, why is that not conceivable? If it isn’t.

Larry: Well, so I think again, it goes back to the oligarchs.

Michael: Yeah, they’ve got the money. Obviously, I know one big difference is that their fuel is money.

Larry: When they give a hundred bucks, they get four hundred dollars back. I could give you example after example. This is a lot of what Our Revolution emphasizes. We talk about the rate of return for Musk on his $250 million contribution to Trump. It’s enormous, it’s billions, SpaceX alone.  Larry Ellison put over $100 million in the campaign and thanks to Trump he just bought control of TikTok for one and a half billion dollars. He’s not the only player, but basically the market value of the America TikTok in that deal with China, the U.S. part of TikTok is at least $15 billion. They get a rate of return on their political investment.

Last week we saw the wrecking ball in the east wing of the White House. Trump loves the wrecking ball as he said. That’s a lot of his life.

But his wrecking ball, again, in in more positive terms, as you put it, is action. And some of the action that he’s done in a certain way is good for working class people. Not the majority of it. But Social Security recipients, under a certain income, paying nothing in income tax on their Social Security that’s positive action.  Those benefits were not taxed for years after Social Security began. Another example is tipped income now not taxed for those earning less than $125,000. Trump says that we’re going to focus, even if he doesn’t do it, on bringing back American manufacturing jobs, a place like Hagerstown, where I spoke on No Kings Day, has been devastated by American trade policy. Trump’s tariffs on steel, do lead to more investment in the steel industry. A lot of the rest of what he does is a disaster, right? The big bullshit bill, is a disaster for working class people, and gives nearly all the money to the billionaires and crumbs to working class people. He and Elon Musk have gutted federal workers and their unions. Trump has all but destroyed the National Labor Relations Board.

Michael: Yeah. I mean, I hate to press the issue, but imagine Bernie in 2016?  Suppose he had something like MAGA, except for justice and equity and fairness and participation, and you know, he really strongly felt he could not he, but that whole project could substantially, even fundamentally, change the operations of the government then hopefully moving on to the economy. Could that have happened?

Larry: Two things: First in 2015-16, in that nominating process, there were 800 superdelegates who counted the same as the elected delegates. And so by the time of the Iowa caucus, the first event, Clinton shows up on you know your favorite TV show with 500 delegates, and Bernie has me and about three others. She won the majority of the elected delegates as well. But right before the Democratic Convention, Bernie made a deal with her to establish a Unity Reform Commission, and Clinton named the chair and Bernie named me as the vice chair. In 2018 the DNC supported the commission proposals and super delegates were eliminated from the nominating process in 2020. In 2020 the Bernie movement was just as strong, and Bernie was headed towards winning the nomination, after his wins in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.  Obama gets involved pushing 3 of the leading candidates to drop out and support Biden to stop Bernie.

But to your question, if Bernie had won in 2016 or 2020, and Congress remotely resembled the Congress of 2009, Bernie would have pushed through massive change. Would he have been the wrecking ball that Trump is, smashing the rules? No. But the filibuster would have been limited or eliminated, and much deeper change on health care, the environment, wealth taxes, and a very different foreign policy and slimmed down military spending would all have been enacted. I think the Bernie movement would have led to massive change in America.

Michael: Let me ask you to switch over for a second. How do you explain the Republican Party, not Trump, not you know the various billionaires? But the Republican Party, are they hypocrites and liars? Or have they actually shifted that far to the right? If Trump disappeared tomorrow, would they still be what they are today. In other words, what the hell happened?

Larry: Yeah, well, I’m no expert on that. But in my opinion, the ability of the Trumpers and the right wing to dominate Republican primaries, has been critical. So Republican primaries are dominated by big money as well as Trump’s impact, and the result is that nearly the whole Republican Party moves to the extreme right.

I think the Republican Party is a total lost cause in terms of being controlled by right-wing money and right-wing candidates who can win primaries across the country.

Michael: I want to move away for a second, if we can, from one area where you have a whole lot of experience, the electoral dynamics, to another where I suspect you have even more experience, which is labor. And I’m wondering, you know, Sean Fain was talking about a national strike. And there’s certainly some labor participation in No Kings, but as yet, maybe I’m just not seeing it, I haven’t seen an inclination to do that. Not even to move No Kings from weekend to, I don’t know, Wednesday, which would be a much stronger statement, and to have unions basically not just support it, but support it in the way that only they can, which is with a strike. And I’m wondering what you think. Why does it or doesn’t it happen? And do you think it can happen before they have entrenched fascism? Because it may be the main impediment to doing that.

Larry: In my opinion, exactly the right question. The next No Kings, if it’s going to go to another level, needs to be on a weekday. Fine to think of it as one hour of resistance, an hour of action.  In CWA we would sometimes stop for five minutes to demonstrate solidarity.

We have stickers with a clock at 12 o’clock and it would have the date, and that’s all that would be on the sticker. In Argentina they’ve had one-day walkouts across Argentina against Milei, the right winger president in Argentina right now. And they have a whole different way of organizing there and that leads to different possibilities. In terms of Sean Fain and talking about May Day 2028, which is when big three auto contracts expire, there’s a lot of time between now and then? But I think the broader point that you’re making, putting aside May Day 2028, we’ve got to be teaching people union by union, even in a local union, that we can take action together and that’s our solidarity.

Even if we are not on strike, for example, we can meet in the parking lot, and march in to work together. We might be office workers or in a garage or a manufacturing plant. The action is not as important as doing it together.

Michael: Yeah, it communicates the idea. We can act together. And now let’s think about the next step, and the next step, but it’s the whole idea of collectivity. The idea of a massive militant action is beyond current comprehension somehow.

Larry: The lessons of mobilization, start with something everybody can do.  And so we look around and think we’re all doing this. And then you work up to a momentary work stoppage. Or call it “Stand up.”  Play Bob Marley in the workplace—Stand up for your rights.

Michael: Remember the peace sign? It had the same idea, right? People flashing it from car to car. Okay, you see you are part of something bigger. Now, what can this bigger thing additionally do? That’s what No Kings has to somehow begin to communicate and to embody for people. I’m not sure it is there yet, but it’s they’re getting there.

Larry: No, it’s not there but it’s still positive. You know, six or seven million people at thousands of locations, that’s a big positive. But your points are key—Move it to a weekday, and second what’s the organizing that we need in workplaces? So what can we do in workplaces so that we can begin to see the solidarity there? Can we get everybody on that weekday, the same 7 million that rallied, to wear yellow, the symbolic color from No Kings Day, even if it’s a yellow armband, a yellow sticker, something.

Michael: The MAGA hats, which you know, our side sort of laughs at, those were not nothing. They were part of the process. Because you look around and you see, oh shit, I’m not alone.

Larry: Yeah, the whole thing, not just the hat, but the whole the whole way he uses MAGA, obviously makes me vomit. But that symbolism is key, and people taking action with those symbols is key. So can we move to a weak day, and can unions, together, lead more?

Michael: That was actually gonna be my next question. That is, you’ve got a lot of experience with organized labor, with workers, on and on. And the fact is that there’s no point in making believe it isn’t the case. A substantial percentage of working people voted for Trump. A substantial percentage of people in unions voted for Trump. And let’s say the left or the progressive community’s ability to speak to that is nearly zero, or has been nearly zero. It hasn’t been very effective. And more times than not, in my part of the left, it’s disparaging. You know, it’s basically, they’re unreachable, they’re pathetic, they’re this, they’re that. With no real comprehension, I don’t think, of the circumstances that cause somebody to feel the way they feel. And to then look at Trump and feel, okay, maybe he’s a schmuck in some ways, but you know, he’s giving me a sense of efficacy. I’m on a team all of a sudden. And I’m gonna be loyal to that team. And that team is team Trump. And, we have to be able to speak to that and certainly not by calling them deplorable.

Larry: In CWA a huge part of the membership is in the South and in so-called right-to-work states. It’s not the majority, but it’s a huge part. And support for Trump would be even higher there. But there’s also support for Trump among Verizon technicians in New York City. Not the majority, but those are members who have been on strike over and over again. So in discussing Trump start with things like destroying the National Labor Relations Board. Now, do we care about the bureaucracy? Not much, necessarily, but we care about our rights to fight the boss. If we have no right as working class people to fight our employer and we’re union members, we better understand that that is fundamental for us. And that kind of education in depth, union by union, needs to be much greater than what exists right now. Too much defense, not enough offense. It’s not about being offensive, it’s about offense.

Michael: Everybody knows that poverty hurts. sickness kills, racism rips you apart. Everybody knows the bad things. It’s whether or not you have something to replace it with and a means to win that. That’s what people doubt. And absent that you can imagine somebody saying, well, look, Trump’s gonna turn everything upside down, and maybe when he turns everything upside down, I’ll get something a little better. Because certainly it’s not gonna get better via Biden? And for working class people it’s not crazy, and I don’t think it’s crazy either. In the absence of any kind of vision, in the absence of any kind of strategy, this maniac with the hammer sort of looks like maybe it’ll be positive. It won’t be. It’s horrendous, but you can see why somebody would want to grasp at it.

Larry: I would take a page from Zoran, who talks about affordability, but he does it for New Yorkers in very concrete ways. For the million households that have rent control, he wants to freeze the rent. And the people voting for him believe he’s gonna do those things. In terms of national issues, what if we had candidates running on issues like bargaining for all? When elected, I am gonna fight and work for every worker that’s trying to get a contract. I’m gonna punish the companies that are stopping them. Starbucks can’t get away with 5,000 people organizing and there’s no contracts three years later? They get away with it in part because the legal process, and delay in particular, works for the management of Starbucks. It’s not just Starbucks, Amazon is a more serious example. Bargaining for all, I’m gonna run and fight for it not just talk about it. This is what we can do at a city level, or a federal level. Medicare for all is another example. Let’s start by bringing the age for Medicare eligibility down to 55 or 60. We need to have two or three issues like that and a campaign with a strategy for change not just a message.

Michael: Well we’re over our hour, but is there anything that we haven’t dealt with you just want to bring up?

Larry: I want to stress one more time for political activists that I’m not saying you only work inside the Democratic Party. You work inside and outside. You work on issues, you form other organizations. But the part of you that ends up liking a Zoran or a Bernie, remember they ran as Democrats. To get more people like that elected as Democrats, we’ve got to pressure Democratic state and local parties, to block big money in the primaries, to block corporate money in the primaries, to block dark money in the primaries, to block big money in the primaries, eliminating outside separate campaign expenditures run by billionaires. The party can demand that nominees get elected without big money. Those fights are necessary fights if we’re gonna elect people as Democrats that are not a one-off thing like Zoran, but an everyday thing. We’re not gonna win with that kind of money thrown in, particularly in cities and in House of Representative districts or even Senate states where only a Democrat’s gonna win. That big money’s going to eliminate our candidates, and then we can’t win the things we love. So I just want to stress that more because it tends to be down in the weeds. But just like getting rid of superdelegates, which we got accomplished, we will have to get rid of this money or we are not going to elect Democrats that’ll fight for the people we love.

Michael: Why is it impossible to have elections simply federally funded with a cap? So you run for office, and you can’t spend $400 million, there’s a cap, and the money all comes from taxes, and the same amount for each party, and there’s rules on that, and on media visibility, et cetera, et cetera. Is all of that, they’re all just reforms worth seeking. It doesn’t seem very extreme to me. Is that not, in some ways, an easier way to accomplish that same end?

Larry: No, because, first it would currently take 60 senators to put that bill on the floor and do even a portion of what you’re saying, not necessarily the whole thing. Public spending is definitely part of the solution, but we would need 50 senators prepared to end the filibuster, and a House majority that’s gonna pass it, and a president who will sign it!

All I’m saying is that along the way, a much easier thing is for a voter upsurge to demand that Democrats, state by state, must not nominate candidates who use big money to win primaries. This just requires a simple motion adopted by a state Democratic Party. Yes, what you’re saying is great, and we could get rid of Citizens United if Congress would pass legislation, or a constitutional amendment, but we can’t wait for that. One of the elements of electing a Congress that will do that is getting big money out of the Democratic nomination process. Party reform is part of this process. Your action plan is a bigger step that I totally support as well.

[This is a minimally corrected transcript of the 360th RevolutionZ Episode with Larry Cohen of Our Revolution as guest.]

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